I've been a big fan of Estimote (and beacons in general) for awhile now, but only just recently had a chance to finally play around with their nearables, dubbed Estimote Stickers. These stickers are similar to beacons, except that their primary purpose is to be attached to physical objects, and in addition to proximity also broadcast more contextual information about the object. This extra information contains a bunch of interesting details such as temperature, orientation, and…

It's no secret that I'm a big proponent of testing, and lately I've been getting a lot of questions around how to approach getting started and what technologies to use. While I have a good amount of content coming out around this, some already announced, some to be announced soon, I thought I would also try to take some time to put together a few posts on the subject as well. In this post I'm going…

With the release of Android 5.0, also known as Lollipop, Google introduced its new material design style. Material Design is a huge step forward for Android apps, bringing with it a total overhaul of theming, as well as a bunch of new UI components you can use in your apps. To make things even better, Google also released the Android Design Support Library, which allows you to take advantage of material design in versions of…

In my last post I talked about one of the roadblocks I hit when upgrading to Android's new ActionBarActivity. That was definitely a major pain, but there's one other issue I've run into so far that I wanted to call attention to as well. This one didn't cost us nearly as much time as that last one did, but it was certainly unexpected. Our apps make use of a single activity and fragments for each separate…

As part of updating our apps to use the latest Android support library to bring in some of the nice material design classes in there, we also started switching over to using a Toolbar as our action bar. If you're just getting started in making the same upgrades in your app I suggest starting with this excellent post on Xamarin's blog that outlines what you need to do. Getting things migrated was easy enough but we…